When someone asks me how I define success as a leader, my answer surprises them: I'm successful when I am no longer needed.
Not because I've become irrelevant. Because the people around me have become capable.
It's a line I borrowed years ago from Todd Henry's book Die Empty, and it has reorganized how I think about almost every leadership decision I make. Who am I developing? What am I making transferable? Which decisions still require me, and why?
The trap of executive work is that being needed feels like value. The longer you're indispensable, the more important you appear. But indispensability is a tax on the organization. It caps growth at the size of one person's attention.
The harder work — the work I think actually matters — is to leave teams measurably stronger than I found them. To leave systems that don't require my voice in the room. To leave people who are running organizations of their own.
Great leaders don't accumulate power. They distribute capability.